The wake of the twenty first century has seen the world emerge into a globe of digital society. More so, the emergence of the digitalized social media has seen the world look like a small village. This is because social media sites, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are often used to spread the current global issues and news as they sprout. Thus, nearly everybody remains updated on the current worldly happenings from one minute to the other. Besides, social media has gained a variety of uses; including normal networking with others, sharing funny and entertaining contents, passing time, staying in close touch with what our friends are doing, meeting and creating new friends, research work or finding products for purchase, exchanging opinions, and sharing of photos and videos with friends (Herhold, 2018). Therefore, the use of social media is inevitable in the twenty first century. This article describes how socialization in the digitalized society is greatly championed by various forms of affect.
The definition of the term “affect” is debatable and depends on the context at which it is used. The Dictionary.com defines the word affect as the impression of the mind or the situation of moving feelings. However, this article uses the term affect to refer to the experience of intensity that can often be unconscious (“Feeling Digital”, 2019). Affect is thus, energetic and has the potential to cause strong feelings to an individual. Use of social media is associated with various forms of affect. These include boredom, loneliness, and anxiety. Boredom and loneliness go hand-in-hand with one another. For instance, a person who is alone at a particular place and doing nothing feels highly bored. He or she unconsciously often finds himself or herself engaged in deep thoughts, most of which are unconstructive. Lonely people usually think of their friends or relatives and this triggers them feel the urge of interacting or sharing with them. If circumstances don’t allow us to meet with our friends and relatives, as in the case when friends and relatives are far away from us, we deeply miss them; and consequently we experience a state of loneliness which is usually spiced up by a state of boredom.
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Boredom and loneliness often make us start looking for means of interacting and sharing with our friends and relatives wherever they are. This explains why social media is inevitable in the 21st century. Social media offers us with social platforms for interacting with distant friends and relatives when in the state of loneliness and boredom. A state of loneliness and boredom drive many people, especially the youth, into think of turning on social media sites, such as WeChat, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. These social media sites help people to connect to friends and relatives they stay away from them. As for me, I spend most of my weekends on WeChat connecting and video chatting with my best friends and relatives I stay away from. In addition, I often find myself scrolling through the Instagram app just for fun. Interestingly, my current statistics indicate that I spend on average, one-and-half hours a day on both WeChat and Instagram.
Anxiety is another form of affect that largely drives people into social media use (WEAREPLANC, 2014). Anxiety is the dominant reactive form of affect in the contemporary capitalism (WEAREPLANC, 2014). Most social media users are the youth who are in the process of discovering various aspects of life, such as sexuality, technology, and other aspects of globalization. Most of these life aspects are abundantly available in social media sites like the internet search. Therefore, people (me included) often tend to spend a lot of time in Google search, as part of learning. Besides, the youth use social media for sharing academic learning experiences. The youth are always anxious of learning new things from their peers. They are also anxious of sharing new academic discoveries with their peers. This therefore, further explains why the youth are spending lots of time in social media.
One affect I see operating somewhat regularly in our class document is the stickiness (“Feeling Digital”, 2019). The concept of stickiness was first formulated by Sara Ahmed (2014) to describe how some of the objects that are shared and circulated socially become sticky, or saturated with affect, as sites of personal and social tension (“Feeling Digital”, 2019). Ahmed (2014) further asserts that “Things can be sticky because they are loaded with affect”. I agree with these statements for some reason. For instance, I have witnessed many people (including me) addicted to viewing “sticky videos, sticky images, sticky hash tags, and sticky discussion threads” which easily go viral on social media. Many people, especially the youth find themselves hooked-up on social media; not because they are viewing something of great help to them, but because they are addicted to viewing these sticky documents.
One day I decided to do some online experiment to see the intensity of how people are attracted to stick documents on social media. In my experiment, I posted two documents on Facebook. One of the documents contained funny aspects of life, while the other contained normal life advisory statements. Then at the end of the day I went through the two documentary posts where I made a very interesting observation. The documentary post that contained funny aspects of life had more comments, more replies, more reactions, and more shares than the documentary post that contained normal life advisory statements. This made me conclude that funny posts easily become sticky and saturated with affect.
Technological advancement has currently taken the better part of inevitability of social media. For instance, the 21st century has seen technology champion the manufacture of sophisticated devices that are used by people to access social media more easily and faster than ever. For example, the availability of cheaply and readily available smart-phones has made people get easy access to internet services. Today, it is a common phenomenon to see the youth chatting on social media sites, such as Facebook and Whatsapp, while walking on the road or even most interestingly while in the toilets due to the availability of portable smart-phones. Other devices such as laptops have made internet access more impressing and convenient than before.
Besides, technology has been used to come up with attractive social media components and tools. For example, technology has been used to come up with sticky documentary materials like videos, images, hash tags, and discussion threats (“Feeling Digital”, 2019). These components have therefore, made social media so attractive that we have become part of social media. At the same time, social media contains useful materials like learning documents, sharing forums, and meeting sites. Consequently, social media has become part of our lives in such a way that we cannot avoid using social media.
Despite all the merits attached to social media, social media is also associated with various demerits. First, social media is highly addictive and time-wasting. This has made the youth (who are the most productive individuals of the society) waste a lot of time on unconstructive social media platforms, hence rendering the youth unproductive; resulting into deterioration of the national economy. Secondly, social media has been misused by criminals to cause cyber bullying; thus becoming a threat to the national security. In addition, continuous use of social media has adverse effects on people’s wrists as a result of too much keying. Prolonged staring of screens results into eyestrain, thus impairing with people’s eyesight. It is therefore, recommended that people use social media with moderation and for the correct purpose in order to yield the right fruits of social media.
References
Feeling Digital: Public Secrets. (2019). 7: 1-20. (Online).Downloaded on https://fashioningsociology.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/lindgre-chapter-7-1.pdf
Herhold, K. (2018). How people use social media in 2018: the state of tech social media. (Online).Retrieved from https://themanifest.com/social-media/how-people-use-social-media-2018
WEAREPLANC. (2014). We Are All Very Anxious. (Online).Retrieved from https://www.weareplanc.org/blog/we-are-all-very-anxious/
